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I've become interested in watching paintball videos lately to see what really makes these tournament teams as good as they are. I really enjoyed watching what games they showed on the OLN coverage of the 2002 World Cup, so I wanted to see more paintball footage. I got these videos the other day from www.paintballvideo.net

Here's what I thought of them after watching them all the way through:

FON - Super 7 Huntington Beach

I've been pretty impressed with what FON does for the paintball community in terms of tournament coverage and other little things. I was really impressed with the reports about this tournament, so I decided I'd get at least one video that covered the tournament.

The video is on DVD and comes in a standard music CD case with a cover piece and a really cool back cover picture of Dynasty sitting together as a team. The DVD has 9 games on it, a huge picture gallery and final standings.

The footage is okay. I guess if you really want to watch individual players up close throughout each game, you'll love this video, but I know I would much rather see a large portion of the field and see what is actually going on in the game. Too much up close footage of the players to have any idea of what is going on. If they would have had cameras in each of the four corners of the field and just filmed from those angles and a couple at the 50 sidelines, they could get some much better footage that would show how the game played out.

The video is DVD, but not DVD quality IMO. Some of the footage is grainy when they're following a player that is running. Also, there was lots of sun there and there's points in the video that the glare from the sun makes it so you can't really see much until they switch the camera view or focus in with the camera.

The picture gallery has some VERY good pictures that make for great desktops and just looking through. My main gripe towards FON is that they use ONE song for the picture galleries. In their World Cup video, they used one song for each of the ten galleries, started it at the beginning of each gallery and then it cuts out at the end of the gallery and takes you back to the photo gallery main page. That is extremely annoying and very poorly done. In this video, they use they same song (Limp Bizkit - Rolling), but only part of the song so it just keep repeating a segment of the song. I just turn off my speakers when I watch the picture gallery. I think it would be much easier and come off much more professionally if they would pick a couple of songs, put in enough pictures to cover the length of the song and make that one gallery. Or they could make it one large picture gallery and use a couple of songs. Also, a thumbnail page of all of the pictures in the picture gallery would be nice so you don't have to let the galleries cycle through the pictures to find the one for which you were looking.

Overall it's an okay DVD. If they'd do it a bit more professionally and get better "action" footage, I'd buy more of their videos, but the World Cup video and this one are pretty much the same in terms of their video capturing style.

720 Video - Beyond the Fifty - World Cup 2002

By far the best paintball video I have ever watched. Not perfect (I'm very picky), but I was blown away by the action footage. They captured every game from every angle and it made for an entertaining video that made paintball actually exciting to watch on video.

The video is on DVD and comes in a standard DVD case with two discs. 19 games in total + Product Reviews (DYE and Nexxed), Post Game Interviews and other special features.

There's a nice long interview with the Aftershock guys at the end of their last game. Each game has music with it and the music is a lot of "no-name" bands, but some of it is good and fits the game well. You can turn it off and watch just straight raw footage with all of the cussing, yelling and sound of paint flying through the air and hitting the bunkers. In total it's about 100+ minutes of video.

One of the cool features of this video is the Heads Up Display. Before I explain that, I'll explain one of my gripes about the video. Instead of being wide screen and taking up the whole area of the screen like in a normal wide screen movie, they setup a box template for the video so the video is in the box and on the right top corner it says "720" and below that it either says the name of the two teams playing or if the game has the HUD, they put that in the bottom right corner of the viewing box. What I don't like about this is that the video of the game is in a small box so it doesn't fill up the full 1.65:1 ratio, or whatever it is. I guess they had to do the "view box" so they could have a place to put the HUD when they showed it.

The HUD is only shown on a a few games. I think about 5-6 of the games have the HUD. The HUD is an overhead view of the field that shows the postions of the bunkers, their shape and everything is to scale to the actual field. Each player is shown by either a blue or red dot and as they move in real time, the HUD shows their movement. As players go out, green crosshairs go over their dot and then they disappear from the HUD. This shows you where everyone is at from the beginning of the breakout all the way to the end of the game. You can really get an idea of how teams setup off the break and how they adapt to how the game starts to pan out. A very cool feature. I think it would be cool if when a player goes out, they would put their dot behind the dead box and that way you can just look at the dead box to count how many of each team are out instead of counting all the remaining dots on the field.

My gripes about the video are the box layout and not having the game footage take up the whole wide screen aspect ratio, the extremely annoying, "cheap" computer/robot sounds they use during the introduction and the occasional black/white video they show when they're using one of the elevated camera angles.

The video was expensive, but overall it was worth it. I was very impressed by the amount of effort put into getting as many camera angles as possible and the fact that you can get a sense of how the game is panning out, unlike with the FON videos. I would recommend that you buy this video if you're looking for a GOOD paintball video.

What trends do you see in professional player's styles? I too enjoy watching videos of the pros and observing what makes them good. Here is what I think.

They shoot alot at nothing. Yes, accuracy by volume certainly applies. Their strings of shots (as seen in some higher quality videos) never are dead on. They always seem to vary slightly, with shot patterns like a reading on one of those machines that tells you if you're dead or not.

Guys in the snake almost always score at least one elimination (assuming they aren't shot out going to the snake).

They communicate extremely well.

VERY RARELY do I see someone who immediately calls themself out if they are bunkered. Most of the time, the player will turn around and start shooting at the bunkerer, evey if he has clearly been eliminated. About half the time refs will call both players out. This does not seem fair to me (on the ref's part).

Only about 60% of the balls in each pod actually makes it into the hopper.

The one thing about shooting at nothing I "slightly" disagree with. I believe that the best thing any team can do is keep laying paint as often as possible. There's a segment in the 720 Video during the Ground Zero Black vs. Dynasty game where they show a guy on GZ tucked behind his bunker and all you see and hear is paint raining on the bunker. You can tell the guy isn't moving an inch because he knows he is getting hammered on and doesn't even have the opportunity to look out to see where guys are and communicate with his team.

The other thing about shooting at bunkers is that there's a right and wrong way to do it. I can tell that a lot of the Amateur, Novice guys don't do it right and some of the pros, but I noticed a guy on SC Ironmen that did it perfectly. That is shooting at the SIDES of the bunker, not the bunker itself. It's great and all to make a lot of noise by hitting the bunker, but that's not going to get a guy out. If you throw ropes of paint along the sides of the bunker you'll end up catching someone that peeks out or sticks out something that you'll end up hitting. I've lectured my team on this over and over and they tell me that they notice it works.

I also noticed that the Impulse is one of the worst rapid fire shooting guns I've ever seen. This gun puts out a paint rope that looks like a sine wave. The 720 Video gets some good shots from behind the player showing what they're shooting at and I can tell that the Impulse throws the worst paint rope out of all the tourney guns.

Communication is key. You can tell that with the top teams like SC Ironmen, Dynasty, Aftershock, etc. that they yell constantly. Rich Telford has to be one of the most amazing communicators I've heard. That guy can yell louder and clearer than anyone. You can hear him all throughout the one Aftershock vs. SC Ironmen game. It definitely helps out his front/mid guys. I wish I could yell as loud as that guy without killing my voice box at the end of the day.

I've wondered why Dynasty is the most favorite team of most everyone out there and why they are so consistently in the top 3 places everywhere they go. To be honest, I like them too. I know it's not very "cool" to like them because every little 12 year old loves them to death, but they are a great team and there's no denying that. What I've noticed about them is that they're very agressive and they're smart about it. They pin people down and weed them out and they're constantly throwing paint. They have great front guys that push hard and break open the games.

Last thing I'll mention is that shooting off the break is something just about every team does. Basically everyone off the break is shooting unless they're a tape guy that has to sprint to his bunker. Everyone is crouched down low and shooting paint on their way to the bunker. I've debated about how effective this is, because it seems that it's pretty impossible to be accurate doing it, but I think it's just the fact that the more paint in the air, the greater the odds of them hitting a couple guys running to their bunkers. If you can drop a couple of their guys off the break and have all 10 of your guys still alive, you're much better off than the other team.

There's a special feature in the 720 video called "pulling your pod" that shows a bunch of people pulling their pods and reloading and throwing their pod. It's a pretty cool special feature and I would say that you're about right with your 60% figure.

720video was good. I love the part in the beginning when you hear aftershock say "Why do people come to the World Cup?... To get their *ss kicked by us!"

It has a lot of footage. 2 cd's worth!!! The games got kind of boring after a while... some parts just dragged along. I like traumahead's style when they cut to the exciting parts.

The HUD was alright. I really like how it shows the layout of the field. The interviews were pretty cool also.

Overall I'd say I got my 25 bucks worth buying this dvd. I still prefer truamahead sportz much more though. If you guys haven't seen WC 2002 by traumahead. GO WATCH IT!!! The ending is the greatest!hehe

my 2 cents

After doing some film coverage for FON last week in vegas i can give you some dirty on the filming. FON has two cameras on tripods, these are the ones you can purchase in regular stores so footage is like home vid.

Traumahead was there and have guys not on tripods all moving around and i think on occassion actually on the field during the game, they also had one of those lifts so they could get the overhead field shot. Traumahead still used the regular type home camcorders that had neoprene covers.

720 had what looked like professional film cameras from what i could see that wasn't covered by a towel. The one camera that i kinda shared a spot with on the start of a few games was on a tripod that was average guy height. They also had a rolling ladder platform that they used a couple of times, i'm not sure buy they may have used the same lift that traumahead used to get the overview shot.

A newcomer on paintball vid scene is der der films, i briefly talked to one of the guys and he said they did mainly surfing and snowboarding video but are now moving into pb. der der had two guys with tripods, not sure what type of cameras they had since they too were in neoprene covers.

From what I've heard about PBTV is that they have professional cameras with booms all over the field to get the shot without getting shot, whoever went to Super 7 events can probably elaborate more on this than i can.

The action is great, the HUD is awesome, and it shows good footage... I watched a traumahead video of the 2001 world cup, and the shots were ok... and some other things... but wasn't like beyond the fifty. I couldn't find any of those bands in BT50 though... kinda wanted some of them. But the pulling your pod thing was funny, specially the part where todd adamson trys to find a pod haha.

Good recommendation BlackVCG. Im watching it as I post this, prolly about 45 min into it now. Im liking it cuz of the teams they are lime-lighting. Bad Company is just a tad north of me and Lockout is also on(I have a racecocker) Decent camera angles. Youre right about them having too much up close shots, so you cant see AS much of the field as you could but they kind of make up for it with all the different angles they show. HUD helps out a bunch of keeping tabs of whats going on.